{"id":45337,"date":"2021-03-12T01:00:15","date_gmt":"2021-03-12T06:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=45337"},"modified":"2022-04-07T09:44:39","modified_gmt":"2022-04-07T13:44:39","slug":"qotd-the-modern-university-campus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2021\/03\/12\/qotd-the-modern-university-campus\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The modern university campus"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>If you haven’t been on campus lately, visit your local citadel of learning. Don’t just drive through; spend some time there. On the surface, things look lovely \u2014 ivy covered walls, dorms like 5 star hotels, trendy boutiques selling stuff you can’t afford to buy, undergraduates wearing more than your week’s take-home pay. Light poles and store walls are covered with flyers for causes only the very wealthy and very idle could possibly care about. In short, it’s heaven …<\/p>\n

… but pretty soon you’ll notice that it’s a very battered, grimy<\/em> sort of heaven. Nobody’s from there, nobody stays there, everyone’s just passing through on the way to something better. Certainly including the faculty: Every single professor not currently at Harvard thinks<\/del> knows xzhe deserves<\/em> to be at Harvard, and will get there someday. Everything’s on-demand in a college town, because everything’s rented. That “distressed” look hipsters love so much isn’t an affectation on campus; it’s a logical outcome of the transient lifestyle. Why fix a pothole, paint a building, trim a tree, teach a class anyone could ever actually use? Anyone who complains will be gone next semester anyway.<\/p>\n

Get yours before it’s gone, and if that means skipping town one day ahead of the bill collectors, remember: Capitalism is evil.<\/p>\n

It’s not just campus, either. The rest of the lifestyle is just as evanescent, just as ugly. Think of the food. Whatever you do, you can’t eat what the Normals eat, drink what the Normals drink. Here again, foodie culture isn’t a hipster affectation on campus. It’s deadly serious status-jockeying with your temporary \u2014 always temporary \u2014 peers. You’ve got to win now<\/em>, because next semester they’ll be gone, probably to Harvard, those cheating, ass-kissing bastards. Sure, it looks, smells, and tastes like cold dog puke, but at least you’re the first to eat it!<\/p>\n

Severian, “Politics for Fugly People”, Rotten Chestnuts<\/em><\/a>, 2018-08-24.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you haven’t been on campus lately, visit your local citadel of learning. Don’t just drive through; spend some time there. On the surface, things look lovely \u2014 ivy covered walls, dorms like 5 star hotels, trendy boutiques selling stuff you can’t afford to buy, undergraduates wearing more than your week’s take-home pay. Light poles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,74,57,41,13],"tags":[262,1000,139,1462,764],"class_list":["post-45337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-food","category-humour","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-culture","tag-hipsters","tag-psychology","tag-severian","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bNf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45337"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64584,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45337\/revisions\/64584"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}